My Name: Matthew Sanborn Smith. My challenge: Write 1000 stories by the time I'm 50 years old. Current story count: 160. Current age: 48. (Yes, I know it will never happen. I push on regardless.)
The One-Thousand is made up of stories that are aimed at publication in professional venues.
I've been published at Tor.com, Nature, and Chizine, among others. Listen to me on the occasional StarShipSofa and every single Beware the Hairy Mango. Shoot me an e-mail at upwithgravity@gmail.com

Monday, June 25, 2007

We all lost weight together. It was a backlash against America Twenty-One, when the average weight was six-hundred and thirty-seven pounds and everyone ate Cambodian babies for breakfast. That crisis spurred the eventual embrace of the metric system in the United States. Mildly disgusted with themselves, what Unistatesian didn’t want to tell his friends, “I’m down to two-hundred and ninety kilograms, fatties! What have you done lately?”

After that victory, I’m afraid, real work had to be done. Not exercise, though. Are you kidding? Everyone knew they weren’t fat, they were all just big-boned. Mother had told them as much. Although the ass-bone was never discovered, bone reduction surgeries became the rage. However, as people began inexplicably breaking their bones (and why should that happen? Everyone was much lighter now, weren’t they?), the option of bone replacement became the new fad.

Gross-out, yuchy, organic bones were replaced by carbon fiber tubes. They made bicycle frames out of that stuff and bicycles were light, weren’t they? Well, no one knew for sure because no one had ever been in the physical presence of a real bicycle, but man, it sounded like something someone would say, didn’t it? That was good enough for everyone who couldn’t be bothered to look up such a thing (i.e., everyone).

Having lost so many pounds (metric was somehow forgotten again when measuring weight loss), people found cause for celebration. Finally, they could eat more without all that guilt! With the holidays coming up, they had their brokers double the shipments from Cambodia.

The iGasm had been out for just two months and already it was the best-selling little belt clippy gizmo of all time. I mean, who wouldn’t want one? Its operation was simplicity itself. It only had one button. You’d press that and then have to go home and change your drawers. You didn’t have to cheat on your spouse and you didn’t have to take things into your own hands. Even the people who denounced it on television got their own iGasm through clandestine sources. For research purposes of course. Well, they did an awful lot of research in proportion to the paucity of their findings.

There were imitators, of course. First came the andGasm which allowed the user to sync up with up to three friends for simultaneous enjoyment. This was soon followed by the ifGasm which only worked some of the time and didn’t do very well at all. What knucklehead thought that one up? After that came the orGasm. No, wait, they already had that, I think. Was that the original? I can’t remember but it seems like it had always been around. I hear they’re rolling out the butGasm soon. They haven’t released the specs and no one is sure what it does but everyone agrees that it will certainly merit a great deal of research.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

What you had was a bunch of short people, and when I say short I’m talking a millimeter or so, all living on this kitchen countertop. You’d think it would be a pretty sweet deal, but those ingrates wanted off. They turned to Leonardo, their greatest inventor and said, “Hey, help us out here, will ya?”

“Yes!” he screamed, startling everyone. You know what they say about geniuses: They’re pretty smart.

Leonardo tore a piece of hair from his head and let it drop. “Look at the hair! Look at the hair!”

Everyone looked at the hair. “Maybe this wasn’t the way to go,” Billy Schultz said.

“The hair catches the air, and floats gently to the ground!” Leonardo screamed.

“So?” everyone asked.

“So? We cover ourselves in hair and float from the countertop safely to the ground.”

“Damn, are you sure about this?” Danny asked. “I mean, that’s a long way down, Dude.”

“It’ll be fun, you’ll see,” Leo assured them. He immediately went to work on a hair-growth formula and weeks later, he was covered in hair that was many times the length of his body. The chicks loved it.

“Check it out!” Leonardo screamed. He ran to the edge of the countertop.

Billy said, “Don’t you want to like, test it or something first?”

“Who’s the scientist here?” Leonardo asked, I mean, screamed. He disappeared over the edge. The braver souls ran to the edge to see Leonardo float safely down to the floor below. But then the big lady came, the one who was more than a thousand times their size.

“Goddamned cat,” she muttered. She tore an enormous paper towel from a roll, picked up Leonardo in it and squished him good before throwing him in the garbage can.

“Countertop’s not lookin’ so bad,” Billy said.

“I like the countertop,” Danny said. “Always have. It was my girlfriend who wanted to leave. New coat of paint, it’ll be pretty sharp.”

Everyone wandered home, agreeing to stop at the paint place after lunch and look at colors.

Monday, June 04, 2007

His name was Joe the Fox, but people who didn’t know him well just called him Mr. the Fox. When he went water skiing people called him Larry, even people who knew him outside of water skiing. Joe the Fox had no idea why, but he never corrected them (You never know when you might need another identity). He suspected it was a Superman sort of thing. Superman puts on the glasses, he becomes Clark Kent. Joe the Fox puts on the water skis, he becomes Larry.

Here was the problem though: Joe the Fox found his Lois Lane. It didn’t seem like a problem at first. Her name was Irma and she was wonderful. They met on the slopes. Joe took the lift to the top of the water mountain and met her there. She was the lady who rubbed nutrient jelly on the stray skis that had become orphans when their owners had lost their concentration and sunk straight down into the mountain where only the liqui-miners and the aqua-gnomes dwelled. The skis depended on this jelly in order to stay alive as their lines had been domesticated and were no longer able to hunt in the summer or drill down for fish when winter set in and the mountain turned to ice.

To Joe the Fox, she was the whole package, a beautiful young woman who cared for others. Problem was, she only loved Larry. As soon as he took off his water skis, she’d run screaming. But with the skis on, his proposal of marriage was accepted without hesitation.

So Joe the Fox had to leave his water skis on for the rest of his life in order to find true happiness. I mean in the car, on the shitter, everywhere he went.